What A Difference A Day Makes: Taliban battle made me realise what matters in life

Juice Jar Founder Sam Shephard, pictured at the Juice Jar flagship store on Dawson Street, Dublin. Picture Brian McEvoy

I joined the Royal Marines as an officer in 2011. We did 64 weeks of the longest, hardest training in Nato. 

The prize for passing out was the top six going straight to Afghanistan. I was one of the six — on a plane 12 days later, December 2012.

I was nervous but excited. Now, as a father, I can only imagine how my parents were feeling...

My first contact with the Taliban — January 12, 2013. 

We were on a specific mission to a known Taliban stronghold, inserted basically just to get ourselves into a fight, to free up some capacity for the Americans who were under intense attack to the north. 

We were to draw Taliban attention elsewhere.

We started out at 4am, armoured vehicles pushing us to the south. We were on the ground just before sunrise. 

I was the most excited I’d ever been — it’s what we’d spent a year and a half training towards. 

So I was fully focused on the job; mine was to look after the 30 guys and girls under me. I was 25. 

My boss’s words: “Make your guys hard to kill.” It struck me as abrupt but true.

Our vehicles going in, darkness… you’re hoping your 18-year-old driver knows what he’s doing, not to drive over an IED — one of the biggest threats at the time. 

Stepping out, 19-year-old point man scanning the ground for IEDs as you walk in darkness. 

I’m the boss, on the radio… Warfare’s a young man’s game… Patrolling a number of hours, stopping at compounds along the way, finding AK47s and ammunition… we were in a hotbed of enemy activity. 

We knew they were starting to look at us, it was really just a question of when. ‘When’ came all of a sudden.

Obviously they’d hit us at our most vulnerable — we were in a huge ploughed field, spread out over a 200m stretch, when they opened fire.

Live machine gunfire snapping in the distance makes a loud bang but bullets being fired at you are essentially breaking the speed of light — when they pass over your head, under your feet, they make a crack right in front of you that’s extremely loud… All I remember: ploughed mounds of muck kicking up into my face.

Founder of Juice Jar Sam Shephard is no typical wellness entrepreneur – a standout, life-changing moment for him was four hours of intense fighting with the Taliban over a decade ago.

Some guys immediately dropped to the ground to take cover but I and others just ran, 70m across an open field, to the nearest wall to take some cover.

And then… I’ve a set process to go through, get on the radio, tell those above me what’s happened, in very specific order and great detail. 

The training, drilled into you, gives that bit of faith there’s a way through if you just follow the process. Acting on instinct or raw emotion won’t make the best of the scenario…

We were in a bad situation — half the guys and girls were on the other side of the field, taking fire. We had to figure out a plan to get them back safely. 

I’m on the radio, calling in air support, mortars; we come up with a plan on the ground to try to suppress the enemy fire… 

Two of the guys were able to go back out, grab those on the ground. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. Four hours of intense fighting, 30 of us all got out alive that day.

When the fight was over, back in our vehicles, I took my first drink of water… 40-degree heat.

Later, at our compound — darkness falls early there, 6pm, 7pm — staring up at this starry sky stretching as far as the eye could see in the most beautiful country I’d ever been in, the mountain backdrop, the moon giving a bit of light, all the emotions started coming back. 

It all came at once — how lucky I was to be there, to be alive, what actually mattered in life. All of a sudden, I missed my loved ones. The only thing that mattered then was life, health.

But the responsibility. All the guys sleeping, some on sentry duty. It hit me: it was all on me, to make sure we got up again the following morning. It hit in one big wave… a moment seared onto my memory.

It’s hard now to ever get another moment like it, where you feel you’re under that amount of pressure. You refer back, your baseline’s set very high.

The training worked — it went exactly how it should have. For being such a crazy, scary brush with death, it didn’t overwhelm me, take over my entire mind. I focused on the job, I did it well.

It’s given me confidence that even in the most harrowing of situations, I’m able to cope.

Even in business, no matter what’s thrown at me now, I think I can be a bit more emotionally detached and relaxed.

I grew up quickly. It changed my outlook on life — we’re here for a finite amount of time, we should make the most of every day.

I’ve doubled down on everything I already took seriously — health, family. And I’m thankful to have had the opportunity for something like that to shape me.

• After building a strong following in Belfast and Bristol, Juice Jar CEO Sam Shephard opened the brand’s first store in the Republic, on Dublin’s Dawson St, this spring. 
• By mid-July, it had welcomed 62,000 customers and served 15,000 açaí bowls: instagram.com/thejuicejar